4 more months have gone by, and work on the game has been sparse-- but not nonexistent! I've had the pleasure of meeting lots of excellent developers and even prospective publishers over that time, and it renewed my interest in working on actual features to show off to them rather than just bug fixes for the current game's iteration. These features were not what was promised, so I've decided to label this a minor update despite some significant alterations-- that way, major updates continue to feel like a special occasion!

Changelog:

Major Features:

• 8-Directional Enemy Movement
  • It was about time this got implemented! 
  • If you recall, I was waiting on more sprites. I got sick of waiting for a chance to make or commission some really fancy ones, so I implored my wonderful roommate Alexx to whip me up some freaky dinosaur men. They're apparently Sentai-inspired. Or Kamen Rider. I forget which.
• UI Block-In
  
  • Widescreen is cool and all, but all that extra space won't be doing much once fog-of-war is implemented.
  • This also lets me put more information on screen at one time, which means less menuing later.
• Combat Log
  
  • In lieu of a proper feedback system, I have implemented a text log to help keep track of the goings-on each turn. It can be hard to know how many times you were hit and how hard without attack animations to slow down the game's pace-- not to mention, there was no way to track the damage you were dealing until now!
  • The combat log will also indicate whether you receive an overkill bonus as the result of a particularly epic word, as well as one other thing, listed just below:
• Healing Words
  
  • That's right, there is finally at least one definition mechanic in the game!
  • You can recover health by spelling 'healing' or 'medicinal' words, such as 'recovery' or 'bandage'. 
  • The amount recovered is currently 2 less than the word's length.
  • The list is pretty extensive, but it's far from complete and will be updated in the near future. Eventually, the plan is to have a reporting system in place to determine words that should be detected but lack presence... since there's no way I can catch them all.
  • As with most other parts, there's no visual indicator just yet.
• Difficulty Scaling
  
  • I figured it would be wise to tone the initial difficulty down a bit and allow it to ramp up slowly.
  • Enemies have 10 health, and their damage starts at 2 per hit; every two floors (3F, 5F, etc.), their damage will increase by 1, and they will gain 1 point of defense.

The Rest:

• I was pretty bad at keeping track of my minor changes this time around.
• However, a ton of bugs were squashed, including some game-breakers I wasn't aware of until recently!
• Swap Mode can now be entered from Move Mode.